


Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?

by perfectlight



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: (but not really), Bees, Crack, Fluff, I finally wrote a happy thing, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Sherlock Holmes and Bees, Sherlock in a cardigan, Trust, criminals foiled by pushchairs, giant bees, parenthesis, yard sale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 16:36:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlight/pseuds/perfectlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John still felt ridiculous in the porridge jumper and the awful glasses and Sherlock was pretending to be part of the police force in order to steal a bee from a murderer they were attempting to catch by going undercover at a yard sale, and this was John’s life, and he loved it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?

**Author's Note:**

> I DID IT. I WROTE FLUFF.

The murderer was holding a yard sale. “A prerequisite to fleeing the country, he needs to be rid of his unneeded possessions but doesn’t wish to simply leave them behind for the police to pick over,” according to Sherlock. John didn’t understand why Scotland Yard wasn’t just bursting in on the place and arresting the man (who had, after all, killed his girlfriend in her kitchen with a butcher knife), but when he asked Greg went off about protocol and lack of warrants and plausible deniability and eventually John just shook his head and waved his hand and said “All right, all right,” until Lestrade shut up. The man might not have Sherlock’s genius, but he was still a detective and they could be an annoying sort, John knew. 

 

Hence Sherlock had somehow found a pair of jeans and a knobbly old cardigan (“Disguise, John, I’m an internet sensation now”) and _somehow_ John let himself be talked into an awful porridge-coloured jumper and huge glasses even his blind grandfather wouldn’t have used (“We appear in photographs together, you’re equally recognizable,” something John highly doubted was true, because he was rather forgettable, appearance-wise, and Sherlock was, well, _not_ ) and then they were undercover with a handful of the Scotland Yard, some hobbling pensioners, tired mums, and shrieking children, wandering through teetering stacks of detritus under a crookedly grey London sky in the bloody suburbs, trying in some incomprehensible way to catch a murderer. 

 

They had just barely avoided the collapse of a stack of pushchairs after a pair of squabbling children had accidentally thumped it over, when Sherlock’s eyes went wide. John crooked an eyebrow at him from behind the _ridiculous_ glasses. “Sher- Sean?” (Sherlock had grudgingly acquiesced to taking on a false name, because, as John had protested, there were no other Sherlocks in the world and no that is not meant to be a compliment you prat.) 

 

“ _John_ ,” Sherlock whispered, (there was apparently no need to give John as false name, as “There are 2.1 million Johns in England alone, John, what would be the use?”) awe tinging his words as he stared dazedly straight ahead. “John, do you _see_ that?”

 

“See...what?” John tried to follow the line of Sherlock’s mesmerized gaze, past an old man with approximately three white hairs combed over his bald head admiring a broken stool and a young couple arguing over the price of a dish set, to a dented wooden table upon which various baubles and bits rested, from mildly frightening garden gnomes to one of those ubiquitous Lucky Cats. (Adorable things, John thought, not that he’d ever say so aloud to anyone, especially not Sherlock, because John Watson did not find things adorable, John Watson was a soldier and a doctor and a blogger [for a consulting detective who never deleted any information he could use against someone], and would never find the bobbing arm of a porcelain kitten to be cute in any way.) He didn’t notice anything in Sherlock’s line of sight that would be particularly fascinating for him, though then again, it was difficult to tell what would fascinate Sherlock, apart from a properly gruesome murder.

 

Sherlock suddenly seized John by the elbow and all but dragged him towards the table of trinkets, pushing aside the frustrated couple as he went. He leaned over the scratched table, ignoring the ends of his knobbly cardigan as they caught against the spikes of a small cactus, and stared, captivated, at something within a small glass case. Frowning, John stretched upwards to see past Sherlock’s shoulder (the drastic difference in their heights would never cease to bother John), and saw that it was...

 

...a giant bee. A startlingly realistic, intricate model of a bee, complete with Latin terms and labels and lifelike fibrous netting making up the insect’s wings. It was a shocking display, certainly, a glass-cased bee the size of John’s hand sitting placidly on a table beside a cactus and a Lucky Cat. John’s first thought was _Why the hell would anyone have this in their house_ and his second thought was _Sherlock is going to hang this in our house_.

 

“ _No_ ,” John managed, quite firmly, in his opinion, but then Sherlock straightened up and looked at John with undeniable glee quirking at his lips and squidging up his cheeks, and the grey day shadowed his eyes a thousand different colours, and he was giving John that same pleading look he got whenever he said _please_ , and sod it John knew he was being manipulated but he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to care.

 

“It’s _fascinating_ , John,” Sherlock whispered, alight like a child on Christmas morning, and John didn’t see Sherlock this way very often, notwithstanding the ill-fitting jeans and awful knobbly cardigan. Suddenly John could not remember how he ever refused Sherlock anything.

 

John pressed a sigh through his lips, scrubbed a hand over his face and wondered if the giant bee would end up on the mantlepiece beside the skull. “Fine. _Fine_ , fine, you can have it. But you’re answering to Mrs Hudson.”

 

“Oh, she won’t mind,” Sherlock said airily, before all but spinning around (John could easily picture the way Sherlock’s coat would have swirled, if Sherlock had been wearing the coat) to snatch up the glass case with an oversized labelled bee inside it and clutch it to his chest as though one of the shrieking children that seemed to be perpetually underfoot would steal it away from him. 

 

Biting back what could have been a groan, a sigh, or perhaps even a fond laugh, John dug a hand into a trouser pocket for his wallet and said, “How much for that?”

 

Sherlock appeared genuinely confused, as though he hadn’t even thought of the question. “John. Consider again why we’re here, and ask yourself whether I will end up paying for this or not.”

 

John caught on, and the groan came out, this time. “So you’re stealing from a murderer.”

 

“Well, not stealing, precisely,” countered Sherlock, tightening his arms ever-so-slightly around the encased bee, “all the materials here will go into police custody anyway once the man is arrested, and I am, though unofficially, an extension of the police.”

 

For a mad second, John wondered if Sherlock was malfunctioning. He stared. “You could not have just said that. There is no chance you actually said that. I’ve gone mental, I must have done.”

 

The picture of innocence, Sherlock blinked, pouted his lower lip just slightly, and it wasn’t fair that his eyes could be so many lovely colours at once ( _like a sodding stained-glass window_ , John thought) it really wasn’t fair. “But I am. So, obviously, when my colleagues decide that this bee isn’t evidence–”

 

John barked out a laugh, startled a child who had been scrabbling for the Lucky Cat, and then wondered if perhaps they shouldn’t talk about these things so loudly. “ _Colleagues_? Sherlock, you –  _when the police are out of their depth, which is always_ –” Laughing pitched the quote much higher than Sherlock’s voice ever had been (Sherlock had probably been a baritone since infancy), and John still felt ridiculous in the porridge jumper and the _awful_ glasses and Sherlock was pretending to be part of the police force in order to steal a bee from a murderer they were attempting to catch by going undercover at a yard sale, and this was John’s life, and he loved it. 

 

When John could breathe again, Sherlock was still staring at him, expressionless, head tipped slightly to one side. “Sherlock,” John managed, and John Watson did not giggle, but he could not think of a single other word to describe the sound he was making now, “you are not an extension of the police. You think the police are idiots, every last one of them, and only tolerate them because they allow you into the more hideous cases where you can show off. You’re a consulting detective, you’re _Sherlock Holmes_ , and if anyone deserves to steal a bee, it’s you.”

 

Before the spike of adrenalin-like laughter could even think of bubbling out of John, Sherlock’s lips had stretched into a smile, and it was a real one, and John felt so stupidly happy that he could only grin back, as Sherlock clutched his precious bee and even when a commotion burst out as the murderer spotted a Yarder and tried to run from them in his maze of a yard sale, neither John nor Sherlock moved until the suspect dashed past his pile of fallen pushchairs and right into the consulting detective and his blogger, and even as John forced the man down and Sherlock began rattling off points and facts and lines of reasoning to the quickly assembling police and startled shoppers, neither John nor Sherlock quit smiling. 

 

And then it was witness statements and handcuffs and the murderer was swept away in the usual car, Anderson was overseeing the clean-up of the crime scene and gathering of potential evidence and muddling the whole thing up in his usual scoffing way, and it was only when Sherlock began eyeing a set of kitchen knives murderously that John said their goodbyes for the both of them and hurdled his consulting detective into the next cab that came by. 

 

“I wouldn’t really have killed him,” muttered Sherlock, long fingers splayed lovingly over the glass case he still clutched, as the cab whirred back into the city centre and curved towards Baker Street. “Though it would have been a gift to the world if I had.”

 

“Well,” John said, pressing his lips together because smiling at that would only give Sherlock ideas, whether John agreed with Sherlock or not (and John found he rather did). “They’ve only just caught out one murderer who used kitchen knives by staking out his yard sale. I shudder to think what they’d have to do to catch you.”

 

“They wouldn’t, obviously,” Sherlock began, (and there was that quirking at the edge of his lips, there was that glittering of his eyes) and John waited for a derisive remark, for a reminder of Sherlock’s massive intellect, for a list on all the ways Sherlock could evade the law if he wished (something John, in moments of foresight, thought he probably ought to write down somewhere, just in case). 

 

And then Sherlock said, “Because I’d have you. They’d not be able to do a thing to me, if you were there. You wouldn’t let them.”

 

John Watson did not cry, but he could not think of a single other word to describe what he nearly began to do when Sherlock said that to him. Because John heard in the undertone, in the thrumming baritone, heard it in swirl of breath and rush of pulse: _I am safe with you. I trust you. I know you will never leave me_.

 

And it is truth, from every angle, in every moment. Because John will always be with Sherlock, John will never leave him, and Sherlock, for all his brilliance and madness and giant bees and beautiful arrogance, will never leave John, will always be with John. John realised (or perhaps realised that he already knew) that he loves this man, more than he has ever loved a girlfriend or boyfriend or flatmate or partner or friend before, because they are more than any of those things, and John loves this man, and suddenly John could not remember how to speak, and had to shut his eyes.

 

“Here,” he heard Sherlock say, and before John had even opened his eyes again Sherlock had produced from _somewhere_ a very familiar item that sat happily on his lap beside the giant bee in its glass case, and when John blinked and looked at Sherlock there was a flicker of colour, or maybe it was light, in Sherlock’s eyes, that made John realise there was more to this gift than just humour, than just something to remember the case by. This was everything of Sherlock, this was wrapped in Sherlock’s unsaid words and unmoving glances and unrepentant lack of respect for John’s personal space, and John knew like he knew the glasses still perched on his nose were idiotic and knew that Sherlock was brilliant that this was Sherlock’s way of telling John that Sherlock loved him, too, in every way.

 

“I stole you the Lucky Cat.”

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time this morning perfectlight went to a yard sale she was told was offering a tripod for not much money. She went with her not much money and bought that tripod and then had a veritable mountain of free clothes shoved at her by the desperate sellers who assumed she was Orthodox when she turned down a rather skimpy dress. Going home with her tripod and mostly unwanted clothes and a broken keyboard she suddenly wondered exactly how Sherlock and John would fare at a yard sale, and what would get them to a yard sale in the first place, and whether this might finally be her chance at writing something fluffy. Hence the birth of this fic. The bees and the wordless confessions of love just sort of happened along the way.


End file.
